Abstract
Even though the sciences may deserve an important and enhanced place in the curriculum, it is crucial that educators situate reforms in science education in the larger social context in which educational reforms are taking place. How and by whom reform is defined and carried out will have a significant impact on who benefits from the process. I argue that education in general has increasingly become dominated by economic interests that can lead not to enhancing equality but to its opposite. There are important ideological shifts that are occurring not only in what education is for, but in the content and control of curriculum and teaching. This has also been accompanied by an attempt to not only increase the influence of economic needs on schools, but to make education itself an economic product like all others. This will have a major impact on science education in particular, because both science and technology are seen as high‐status in the transformation of education into solely an economic tool.

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